Company Profile

Trellis Bioscience, Inc. discovers and develops novel human antibody therapeutics as treatments for infectious disease and oncology indications. The company leverages its proprietary platform technology, CellSpot™, to find rare human antibodies with superior selectivity, affinity and other drug parameters. The company is building a pipeline of monoclonal antibodies in early stage development.

Trellis is privately held and has raised $30 million from two rounds of venture funding. Investors include Series B lead investor Novartis Venture Fund, Morgenthaler Ventures, Easton Hunt Capital Partners, Sagamore BioVentures and Pac-Link BioVentures.

Our experienced executive team has a strong background in antibody discovery and development working at companies such as Genentech and Abgenix.

CellSpot™, Trellis’ proprietary technology, is a very-high throughput cell-based assay that facilitates the discovery of best-in-class antibodies optimized on multiple parameters, such as specificity, affinity, protein expression levels and immunogenicity. The technology can screen up to a million cells in a few days on 10 different parameters simultaneously, representing a 3-4 orders of magnitude improvement over other methods.

Our assay enables the discovery of antibodies that would be overlooked by traditional screening methods, such as very rare antibodies identified in and recovered from human blood cells.

Trellis is using CellSpot to discover antibodies for its own pipeline, incorporating the full set of characteristics needed to optimize their potential success as therapeutics.

RSV ProgramOur furthest advanced program—at preclinical candidate selection stage—targets RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus) a single-stranded RNA virus that causes respiratory tract infections. While mostly producing moderate to severe cold-like symptoms, the virus may cause severe lower respiratory tract disease. Young children and the elderly are most vulnerable to severe infection, and since infection does not build immunity, people can be infected multiple times.

Oncology ProgramsTrellis is also aggressively pursuing cancer targets with CellSpot and has generated antibodies at the lead optimization and lead discovery stage.

PartnershipsTrellis has an antibody discovery partnership with PDL BioPharma and seeks additional partnerships with select pharmaceutical companies. Pilot programs with multiple other partners are completed or ongoing.